Heisman winners Brown in new Hall class

NEW YORK -- Tim Brown played on a high school football team that won four games in three seasons and he went to Notre Dame thinking about a career as a computer scientist.

Gino Torretta went to Miami because Stanford didn't want him. He wasn't sure he'd ever get to start for the Hurricanes, but football was at least a path to a free education.

Brown and Torretta didn't begin their college careers aspiring to be Heisman Trophy winners and Hall of Famers, but that's what they became.

The two Heisman winners were among the 18 players and coaches selected to the College Football Hall of Fame on Tuesday.

"When you picked up a helmet and a football when you were 8, 9 years old, the last thing you thought about was ending up in the college football Hall of Fame," said Brown, the 1987 Heisman winner for Notre Dame.

Brown and Torretta, the former Miami quarterback, and former Syracuse coach Dick MacPherson were at a news conference at the Nasdaq stock market to announce the latest National Football Foundation's latest Hall of Fame class.

"To be able to be selected in this tremendously honored group, there's nowhere to go from here," MacPherson said.

The NFF's veteran's committee selected Williams Lewis, who played center for Harvard from 1892-93 and was the first black player to be picked as an All-American by Walter Camp, one of the pioneers of the game.

John Robinson, who coached Southern California and UNLV, will also be inducted in December.

Torretta grew up just outside of San Francisco, wanting to play for the Cardinal.

"I knew Stanford's education was very valuable and a great degree and that's the way I looked at it. I was going to have an opportunity to get a scholarship but to me that meant it paid for my education," he said.

"Unfortunately, (Stanford) said I wasn't good enough -- or fortunately."